October 15, 1934

Prof. Arthur B. Lamb,

Laboratory of Chemistry,

Harvard College,

Cambridge, Mass.

Dear Professor Lamb:

I have carefully examined the manuscript "Properties of Electrolytic Solutions," by Fuoss, and the accompanying material, and I recommend that it be not accepted for publication.

I concur completely with Dr. Scatchard, and could hardly express my opinion regarding the manuscript better than by quoting his remarks. I feel that the mathematical treatment is not sufficiently reliable nor sufficiently closely related to the chemical problem under discussion to represent any advance over the simpler treatments already published by the author. If published, the paper would have to be read by those people interested in the field, each of whom would thus be forced to devote several hours to this profitless endeavor. It is for this reason that I believe that complicated mathematical treatments of chemical problems should be published only when they represent a real contribution.

To be more specific in criticism, I may point out that the treatment of this manuscript is based on the earlier treatment of ion-pairs, which is in error (as Dr. Scatchard has pointed out) in that the distribution function does not agree with its definition, and that it is assumed that neighboring ions do not affect the probability of a configuration. I agree with Dr. Scatchard that the discussion regarding the size of solvent molecules is far from convincing.

I have found it necessary to keep this difficult manuscript for two weeks in order to work through it carefully; as a rule I return manuscripts within two or three days.

Yours truly,

Linus Pauling

LP:M

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